Computers that defined the information age brought back to life

It's only fitting that the engineer Tony Sale should lend his name to an award honouring projects that keep the memory of early computers alive.

Sale, who passed away last year, embarked on a 14-year rebuild of the World War II Colossus - the computer which helped crack ciphers used to protect Hitler's communications with his generals - with nothing more than eight photos of the machine.

Last week the winner of the Tony Sale Award for computer conservation was announced in London by the Computer Conservation Society (CCS).

Dr David Link was presented with the award for having "made an outstanding engineering achievement in computer conservation".

Link spent years sourcing Ferranti parts to build the replica console seen here. Underneath the covers is a modern PC running an emulator of a Ferranti running the LoveLetters program.

David Hartley, member of the CCS Tony Sale Award committee, explained why Link had been chosen to win the inaugural Tony Sale award: "Tony Sale did a remarkable job and he was an incredible character.

"We wanted to reward someone who had done something creative and clever of an engineering nature - building a machine, a replica or discovering some old software and getting it working. We wanted a project that Tony would recognise as being important," he said.

Hartley praised Link for his persistence in researching how LoveLetters and the Ferranti worked, and sourcing the parts to build the replica.

Photo: David Link

The replica console built by Link includes original switches and lights from the Ferranti Mark I, and is the same size as that of the original machine.

Link said that it took him two years of searching eBay to source the switches and lamps he needed.

The switches can input data into the emulator - in five-bit Baudot code - allowing users to enter their name so it can be signed on one of the generated love letters.

Photo: David Link

The Ferranti Mark I was a commercial version of the Manchester Baby, the University of Manchester research machine built in 1948.

The Baby processed instructions significantly faster than the computers that preceded it. Before the Baby computers were fed instructions by slow mechanical or manual sources, such as paper-tape. In contrast the Baby could rapidly read programs and data from its electronic memory.

The Ferranti's memory was built from cathode ray tubes (CRT) - that at the time were more commonly used by TV and radar displays. The CRT memory - known as a Kilburn-Williams tube and seen here - writes information in a similar fashion to the way an old CRT TV displays a picture. It fired an electron beam at a phosphor screen to write a binary 0 or 1 - a bit - to memory. The beam alters the distribution of electrical charge on the screen and this change is detected by a metal screen or mesh that sitting alongside the tube.

Because the charge dissipates rapidly the beam had to be constantly fired to keep the bit in memory.

Of course, the memory capacity of the Ferranti was, tiny by modern standards, holding a fraction of the data of a single MP3 album track today. The machine used eight CRTs for its primary memory - each capable of storing 32 40-bit words.

Photo: David Link

Link's replica Ferranti can be seen running the LoveLetters program in an exhibition called LoveLetters_1.0.

During the exhibition generated letters are displayed on a projector on a wall, are printed out on a reconstructed Creed No. 7 teleprinter from 1931, seen here, and read out by a computer.

Photo: David Link

The LoveLetters_1.0 exhibition is at the Heinz Nixdorf Forum in Paderborn, Germany from 24 October to 18 November and at the Microwave Festival in Hong Kong from 3 November to 20 November.

The love letters generated can also be viewed on the project's website.

Photo: David Link

Another project that was nominated for the award was the rebuild of the PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

The release of the PDP-1 computer in 1959 was a landmark in computing. It was the first commercial computer whose design prioritised usability - starting the journey towards affordable and intuitive computing.

The PDP-1 pioneered timesharing - which allowed multiple users to simultaneously use and directly interact with a computer. Prior to this most computing was carried out via batch processing, where a computer is given a series of jobs and carries them out sequentially, leaving the user to wait for their job to finish.

Only about 50 machines were produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation but the PDP-1 introduced a new class of machine - the minicomputer - which was significantly cheaper and smaller than the mainframes that dominated computing at the time.

Before the PDP-1 computing power had mainly been the preserve of big business with deep pockets but the PDP-1 made relatively powerful computing affordable to small businesses and laboratories for the first time.

Nearly 45 years after the PDP-1 was announced, in May 2004, the Computer History Museum began restoring an original PDP-1 to working order. The picture shows the rebuilt machine with the restoration team members, from left to right: Joe Fredrick, Bob Lash, Lyle Bickley, Rafael Skodlar, and Tim Coslet

Photo: Computer History Museum

The restoration of a 1963 PDP-1 was completed in October, 2005 and is now on display in the Museum's Restorations Display Area.

The first step of the project, and one of the most time-consuming, was the repair and testing of the machine's power supplies to ensure it wouldn't damage the computer circuitry when turned on.

But while the machine's CPU worked almost perfectly right away, restoring the peripherals - such as the paper tape reader and punch, a screen with a light pen and a typewriter - proved to be more challenging.

After the Computer History team completed work on the hardware they began testing original software, and in March 2005 they ran the 1962 game Spacewar!.

Here is PDP-1 restoration team member, Peter Samson listening to music programmed for the DEC PDP-1. During the course of the restoration project, original MIT hacker Samson, read the music data tapes, reverse-engineered their data format, and wrote a program to play them.

The usability of the machine is credited with giving birth to the hacker culture at institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a slew of programs followed its release, such as debugging, text editing, and music programs, as well as games such as Spacewar!.

Another nominee for the Tony Sale award was this restoration of the 1940s electromechanical calculator Z3.

Work on the reconstructed machine - seen here - was initiated by Professor Raúl Rojas, of Freie Universität, Berlin, and Dr Horst Zuse, of Technische Universität, Berlin.

The great, grandaddy of the modern computer, the Z3 was the first working machine whose processing architecture resembled that of a modern computer.

Just like today's PCs the Z3 had a CPU where arithmetic was carried out, memory in which to store data, was programmable via its tape reader, and had a unit to display the output of its calculations. The other thing that that it had in common with today's computers was that it used binary to carry out its calculations - which greatly simplified the structure of its components. The memory was made up of 2,600 telephone relays - basically electromechanical switches that could represent binary 0s and 1s - that allowed it to handle 64 22-bit numbers.

The Z3 was the world's first operational general-purpose program-controlled calculator and was used by the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter to aid aircraft design during the Second World War. Unfortunately the Z3 was a casualty of the war, and was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin.

It's only fitting that the engineer Tony Sale should lend his name to an award honouring projects that keep the memory of early computers alive.

Sale, who passed away last year, embarked on a 14-year rebuild of the World War II Colossus - the computer which helped crack ciphers used to protect Hitler's communications with his generals - with nothing more than eight photos of the machine.

Last week the winner of the Tony Sale Award for computer conservation was announced in London by the Computer Conservation Society (CCS).

Dr David Link was presented with the award for having "made an outstanding engineering achievement in computer conservation".

Link spent years sourcing Ferranti parts to build the replica console seen here. Underneath the covers is a modern PC running an emulator of a Ferranti running the LoveLetters program.

David Hartley, member of the CCS Tony Sale Award committee, explained why Link had been chosen to win the inaugural Tony Sale award: "Tony Sale did a remarkable job and he was an incredible character.

"We wanted to reward someone who had done something creative and clever of an engineering nature - building a machine, a replica or discovering some old software and getting it working. We wanted a project that Tony would recognise as being important," he said.

Hartley praised Link for his persistence in researching how LoveLetters and the Ferranti worked, and sourcing the parts to build the replica.

Photo: David Link

About Nick Heath

Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic UK. He writes about the technology that IT-decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.

My Dad installed & repaired what was called the UNIVAC Scientific Computer system for the Department of the Navy in 1963. He was a Data Systems Technician when he finally retured with over 32 years of Service in 1975.
I bit my teeth on Punched Card systems of 80 & 96 column formats in the early tp late 70s, & worked my way into the IT field from there.
RCBINNORVA

.... I used to run a monthly payroll for 1200 employees on a machine (Univac 1004) with 2k of memory. The master file was on white punched cards, with variable data for one month punched onto red cards, then card-sorted into the master file. Next month, the data was on blue cards. So you could see from the other side of the room the status of the file.
Prior to that, I used the Deuce with mercury tanks for memory - you put a sound pulse in, counted 32 machine cycles, and then put the sound back in if you wanted to remember it. With several of these, you had 32 bit Words to play with.... I still have the user manual somewhere....

The first computer I ever worked with was the IBM 360 using punch cards and magnetic drums(1972). My next was the PDP11 using paper tape to record programming and a teletype machine for I/O purposes. My first owned computer was a machine with no name that ran a 8008 chip with 8k of ram and used a logic board and teletype machine again. I went with an Apple 2 and then a Mac. From the 90's I have built from the ground up purchasing what I need to upgrade. Today, I have three systems at my residence that run from DOS to Windows 7. When will I recycle the old ones with be the great question that my wife keeps asking
Stan

What a slick piece of hardware. Binary machine language only, manually entered in the regisers. 16-bit Octal. First program test was to solve Ohms Law (E=IR) for any unknown and make it print the answer on the teletype. Great fun. Got an A. 1965. Wish I had that baby now!

I was there with Peter Samson in the early days of MIT's PDP-1, an engineering prototype donated by DEC. A significant proviso of the donation was that the computer be made available to undergraduates--unheard of in those days. (Ken Olson, Digital's founder, had no advanced degree,)
Hands-on access to a powerful (for then) computer changed a lot of things and contributed to the roots of a generation of computer scientists--and hackers. While others were creating utilities and the first video games, I was programming modules for analyzing physics experiments by reading back the light from the programmed CRT beam after it passed through spark-chamber photos. The lure of long hours in intimate dialogue with a digital dream-machine was heady--and probably contributed to my becoming an MIT dropout.
I did return, graduated, and went on to the first of several careers that straddled the divide between technologies and people, most recently as an industrial designer specializing in interaction design, and writing techno-thrillers (Web Games, etc.). What goes round, comes around.
--Prof. Larry Constantine, University of Madeira

First programmed a 4K 1401, then a 10K word 7074, then a 16K 1460, 360 mod 30,... things have changed over the years but a lot of computers are still performing the same functions as they were back in 1962. Albeit a little faster.

I'm really glad to see some of this stuff fixed up. We restore old cars, and lots of other things, but it seems like old computers (because of their size and lack of modern functionality) get over-looked. Pretty cool!

I have fond memories the Siemens R10/R30 series which I believe was more or less a copy of the IBM360, I first encountered it in 1980 when it was well and truly obsolete but was used by the HELL company on their scanners for commercial reasons.

was the first mainframe I used after the ICL 1900, and was even better, at least from a programmer's point of view. Its command language was the best I have used, despite being based on German rather than English. This raises a question: why are modern systems not improvements on the TR 440? Unix is even worse than ISPF on TSO on MVS on IBM mainframe, which was what at least scientific users of other mainframe systems used to mock, and which also I have worked on. We seem to have gone backwards in some respects, and not obviously necessarily.

I saw one of those units - a box about 15 (or 18) inch square, where you could choose O or X, and you first or the machine ... back in 1967, when on excursion with the Scouts to the Museum of Science and Technology in Sydney [ Aus. ] - ( I think the place is now called the Powerhouse Museum ) ...
I remember a big line of people trying to beat the game, when some small boy on his dad's shoulders, calling let me try - actually beat the machine - first go !

I was worried for a moment there when you started out with the Apple / Mac stuff. It would have been so sad to think someone went through the 80's and 90's with only Apple products. Those litigious Cupertino control freaks. What has the World come to when Apple is now one of the top earners? I still don't miss the 360. An 8008 with 8K? Way too nouveau for this discussion. 8K? That probably used some of them there new fangled RAM chips.

32K???? We would have killed for 32K! The IBM PC in 1982 only had 16K.
Model: 5150
Released: September 1981
Price: US $1,565 ~ $3,000
CPU: Intel 8088, 4.77MHz
RAM: 16K
Don't let that 4.77 Mhz fool you. It took 4 clock cycles to execute a No Op.
I give Microsoft all the credit for making software bloated as it is today.
I give credit where credit is due.
I also give Microsoft credit for lowering the bar on quality.
Microsoft has done very well. making it socially acceptable to ship stuff that does not work well.
And there are some that think Microsoft has not contributed to the current state of the art. AT&T jumped on that ship crap bandwagon all too quick. There was a time when I respected AT&T. That was a long time ago. Before 32K of RAM for sure.
And now!! Those litigious Cupertino f--ks. To hell in a hand basket. Oh my, Oh my.

In 1983 we unplugged our 360 because it just was no longer worth the electricity to keep it running. That was in the days when a KW was reasonably priced. .Like a nickel candy bar. I haven't bought one since they when up to a dime.

The ICT (later to become ICL) 1900 was launched in 1964. I worked on its predecessor, the ICT 1500, which was a rebadged RCA 301. Then moved on to the, then new, ICL1903. Leant PLAN then COBOL. I joined ICL in the early 70s and stayed with them until the early 90s. I'd love to see a rebuilt RCA 301, octal operators console and all. No QWERTY keyboard for that.